Hack Your Bureaucracy with Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai

All right, TGIF! Joe and I are both back now for this one. Welcome back to another episode of In Case You Missed It. It's our weekly news and ideas roundup. Now, today's episode is a fitting end to a wild week of election updates, differing perspectives, and points of view on the future. But at the center of all of these political processes are millions of public servants that wake up each day and contribute their talents to protecting and advancing these democratic processes. Now, this isn't always an easy task. In fact, it's never really an easy task to do what they do, especially in environments that are not always conducive, let's say, to implementing new ideas. So today we're going to talk about how they and others in complex regulated industries, or maybe just bureaucratic organizations, can move the needle forward and get things done, leveraging a new book that's available now Called fittingly Hack Your Bureaucracy. Joe's got his up too, Getting Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. So we've got 2 amazing co-authors that are going to be joining us today, Marina Nitsa and Nick Sinai, both incredibly accomplished public sector innovators that have taken their experience hacking bureaucracy and created a playbook for you to transform your ideas into impact. Nick and Marina, thanks so much for carving some time out to teach us How to Hack Bureaucracy.

Thanks for having us.

Great to be here. So first question for you both, just because you have such an incredible background, I'd love for you to just introduce yourselves to our audience and give us a little information about your experiences, both in the public and private sectors. Marina, let's start with you on this one.

Yeah. So I was the Chief Technology Officer of the US Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama. I came into the federal government 10 years ago through the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. where Nick, my co-author, was actually my boss. And then I was the entrepreneur in residence at the Department of Education working for Richard Culatta, to whom I dedicated the book. And I was a political, so I got kicked out with the president in January of 2017. And since then, I've been doing IT crisis firefighting with my partners at a firm called Layer Olive. And then I do foster care reform with a growing group of about 25 states.

Amazing. Nick, tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Yeah, I served almost 6 years in the Obama administration, initially at the FCC as part of the National Broadband Plan, and then 4 years in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a couple years of which was— I was one of the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officers. Since the White House, I joined up with Insight Partners, a large venture capital and private equity firm, and so I help invest in software companies and help them enter and scale in the public sector. government, that is. And I'm also an adjunct at the Harvard Kennedy School where I teach technology and innovation.

Awesome. Well, thanks to both of you for joining us. Marina, one of the stories that stood out to me in the book was the paperclip experience. Maybe you could share a little bit about that experience and how our state and local technology audience can use it.

Yeah, I hope some can relate. So you might think the Chief Technology Officer of the VA, which is the size of basically a Fortune 10 company, came with a lot of resources and a lot of money. But in fact, I showed up. My job description was to redefine the art of the possible for how America honors and serves its veterans, noting today is Veterans Day. And I had $0 budget and zero people. And in fact, I tried to get a dry erase board, but my public servant friends can appreciate this. I didn't have enough of an office supply budget to get a dry erase board in government. So I had, I was sitting alone in my office with a pile of paperclips and not much else. I had previously spent the last 6 months from the White House auditing how the VA used technology to work down its disability claims backlog. So I was not particularly popular when I showed up at first and was really thinking like, man, how am I going to get traction here at this seemingly immovable, immense bureaucracy? And I remembered the story of this blogger who literally traded a red paperclip, a normal paperclip, through a succession of barterers to get a house. And I thought, while I was sitting there staring at my pile of paperclips, like, hmm, what might I be able to do with my paperclips? And in that moment, the head of executive secretary pool popped her head in my office and said, hey, Marina, have you seen Green Pack 42? And I said, I don't know what that is, and I certainly don't have it here in my empty office, but let me help you find it. So I wandered around the 12-story office building of the VA looking for a Green Pack 42. And it turns out when members of Congress or other agencies send the VA an official letter, it would go in a green folder. And it would get passed around the office for people to weigh in on our official response. And so, when I realized that the executive secretaries were spending half their time wandering the building looking for green folders, I offered to print a barcode on the front of the folders. And this being the VA, I found a closet of unused barcode scanners on the 8th floor, passed them out, and I called this app Folder Finder. But the executive secretary team called it MBOOP, M for Marina and boop for the sound that it made when you were scanning in the folder in your desk. And now, Suddenly I had this amazing political capital with one of the most important teams in any bureaucracy, which is the executive secretary pool. And then I had a succession of barters that I talk about in the book. But just to share, the second one was a few months later, the VA was supposed to launch a website that President Obama was going to announce. And this doesn't seem like the biggest deal, except it was going to be the first website launch after this little website called healthcare.gov. which everybody knows went super, super smoothly. And so the VA, you know, performance tested the site and it crashed at 8 users. And so they were like, oh gosh, this isn't, this isn't going to be good. And somebody from the executive secretary pool was in the room and said, hey, Marina can print barcodes. Maybe she could help fix this app. And with the help of 3 of the new class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, we recoded the app over a weekend, put it up on GitHub Pages, which was the only free resource we had at the time. The VA tried to performance test it again. It crashed the performance testing computer. And it was a great successful initiative that President Obama got to announce and celebrate that went really well. And so I was able to parlay that into a series of additional trades that led to real budget, real headcount. And now, you know, some people listening might be part of OCTO, which is the official Office of the Chief Technology Officer of the VA, which definitely did not exist back then. So just encouraging every folk, even if you feel like you have no resources under your control, there might be ways to trade your paperclip up for dollars or people or other resources that you need.

Yeah, I love that example. I'm going to totally rethink my paperclips and my office supplies budget. So, Nick, I'd like to get your take on kind of this next question. And when we think about bureaucracy, I mean, this typically has a negative connotation. You know, it implies, you know, an influx of complex processes, things that are way too difficult for the average person to navigate. So if bureaucracies are a necessary evil, can we really make them work for us rather than against us?

I think so. And Marina and I don't think that bureaucracy has to have a negative connotation. When you actually study it and you look into it, it's really about consistency of process. It's about expertise. It's about hierarchy. It's about officials. It's about not playing favorites. And when you get to an organization of any size, you essentially need that process and consistency to deliver the kinds of outcomes to millions of veterans, or millions of students, or millions of applications for green cards, or whatever the end user is. You know, we looked all over and studied bureaucracy a little bit, and you realize the way Google is organized for search, or the way McDonald's makes hamburgers, or anything where you want to standardize a process has some bureaucratic aspects to it. You know, if you're, I guess, maybe Elon Musk or, or a family office, you know, that's run by a single individual that doesn't have a set of officials, doesn't have like a defined process, maybe that's far away from being a bureaucracy. But Marina and I, you know, looked at it and then we, you know, we, we came across, uh, the Cheese Board, one of my favorite places in Berkeley, California, where I'm from. And, you know, the Cheese Board has, has rules and processes, and even though it's a, it's a co-op, like an honest-to-goodness pizza shop and grocery store, a cheese shop in Berkeley, it still exhibits a lot of bureaucratic tendencies. And so for us, it really comes down to not that they're— not that you can blow it all up or that you can go around it, because in fact there are antibodies in any organization and you'll get your hand slapped or There will be guardrails or processes set up to— even if you were successful, then the next person isn't able to be successful taking whatever shortcut you took, right? So it really is about understanding how things happen and understanding how you can work within the system and try and change the system too. So we are big proponents of modernizing, of changing, but you have to know the rules, the processes, the consequences, and yes, the people before you try and streamline, modernize, simplify, change. If you just go in with that latter bit, oftentimes you don't understand the context and you can even make things worse.

You know, in the public sector, I want to build on that change thing you just spoke about. We see this reluctance to go first or be the first agency to try a new technology, be the first to make that significant change. But we also see this thing where there's a desire to steal those good ideas, right? They find something that works elsewhere, they're more likely to utilize it themselves. Did you see a similar pattern when it comes to bureaucracies in terms of this willingness to make those process changes?

Yeah, absolutely. So we call this tactic going second. It's something that I definitely use sometimes at the VA and the federal government, especially if DOD had done something already, then it'd be like, hey, DOD did it, we should be able to do it. But at the state and local level, hoo boy, can that be an amazing tactic. So in my foster care work, this is actually where the concept originated. I had a state child welfare director. I was trying to persuade them to do something that I saw as very low risk, very high reward. And they said, well, who else has done it first? And when I said no one, they were like, nope, I can't go first, Marina. Can you set it up so I'm going second? And so literally all of my foster care work these days is around the concept of going second, where how can you find Either another state or another agency within your state. Sometimes a nonprofit partner can work if you're trying to change a policy or practice or start doing something new. Look around to create a comparable that you can point to that's already done that thing. And then the peer pressure changes from, oh my God, it's risky, we can't try that first, to, oh, maybe we're behind now. Like, maybe to accomplish our objectives or to be standardized, we need to be doing that thing. So definitely encourage folks to look for ways to set it up so that you're just going second.

I love that hat. So in the book, you noted that bureaucracies don't have feelings, they have frameworks. And so since we can't appeal to the emotions to make bureaucracy care about our situation, what can we do from the outside to change that? Nick, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

Yeah, well, I think you have to understand the process. You have to actually try the normal way first. And so we're always thinking about, well, what's the shortcut? How do I get around this particular process? But you actually have to understand it because the process is how people are judged. It is— that is the convention. And you can't immediately appeal to emotion. And so, you know, We've worked in a number of areas of significance, of social import. Marina, you know, with veterans and foster care children, appealing to, hey, this is— if we do it this way, it's going to help veterans, that doesn't mean much. Everyone there is trying to help veterans, and the mission of helping veterans is ever-present, but you really have to say, okay, you know, if the form requires X, Y, and Z, then I'm going to go ahead and solve X, Y, and Z. We're not saying that bureaucracies don't have human beings and you can't appeal to their emotions. It's just you still have to figure out, you know, how to go through the process. Once you build those authentic relationships with people, especially inside your same organization, one of the hacks we talk about is actually trying to change the process with full knowledge about how it was designed, why it was set up in the first place. But, you know, you can't just— you can't just be like, well, this is— this is a matter of life and death, or this is a really important social cause, or anything like that, and therefore the rules don't apply to me. And I think that's where people get in a lot of trouble.

You know, I think if you're working in state and local government and you're a public servant, you're there to try and make an impact. But sometimes the systems and processes that are there can make you feel powerless, because this is the way that things have always been done. Maybe, Marina, you can kick us off with what advice you'd have to public servants who are trying to change their agencies from the inside out.

Yeah, I imagine something a lot of public servants can relate to is a belief from outsiders that, oh my God, this must have been designed— like, I heard so often the idea that the VA was designed to keep veterans from getting their benefits, or people didn't want them to have it, and so that's why they made all these extra steps or complicated forms. But I would say the opposite is true, that often processes were never designed at all. Everyone is doing a step. It maybe has, you know, the step has always been done that way, or someone added the step, but no one was ever responsible for or looking at the whole end-to-end process. So, that's one place that we really encourage looking for change. And a corollary to that is our tactic called Cultivate the Caress, which was on a Post-it note of our late colleague Jake Brewer's computer. He was tragically killed in a car accident while working at the White House with us. And a caress is a concept from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. And the idea is in the book that God has hidden people around the earth to accomplish a mission together, and you have to find them. And we use the term more secularly and say, like, hey, in your bureaucracy, rather than going around thinking that people are there to stop you or to slow roll you or to get in your way, what if you approach it as though people are hidden around your bureaucracy to actually help you get your mission done? And how might you find them? And so that's one way of looking at it. Something that Nick has touched on earlier in this conversation is really understanding every individual's risks and incentive framework. And we have a chapter in the book that has literally a list of things you can kind of map out about people. And we're not suggesting that you be like a manipulative psychopath in this, but understanding if someone's a decision maker, what are they motivated by? And what are their risks? You know, they're not going to fill out paperwork, even if, you know, 100,000 veterans are going to die, or a bunch of foster kids are going to be homeless, They have to fill out the paperwork correctly. They're not going to skip a step. They're not going to sign off on, you know, not applicable or blank responses or things that don't meet the mail. And so really understanding deeply, what are the risks someone is facing? What are their incentives? And how might you leverage those to get to the decision or the outcome that you need? While, again, behaving as though everyone is trying to get something done. They're just operating within a process of restrictions, risks, and incentives. You can get really, really, really far.

Yeah, kind of building on that, you know, in the book it's noted that, you know, change doesn't happen because the person in charge declares it should. It requires initiative. So, you know, Nick, for people that are, you know, resigned to dealing with an inflexible system, what advice do you have for them to kind of help them overcome their initial, you know, kind of maybe reservations or challenges and just get started?

Yeah, so that's one of the things that is the danger of being in an organization for a long time. Is you start to think more constraints are fixed rather than variable. And let's face it, you know, all these organizations are human-made, and humans made all the rules. And so we have created whatever rules that are there, and there's no reason why they have to exist in perpetuity. So they can be changed, right? Even our Constitution has a series of amendments. And hopefully your organization is a little bit more easy to change. And so the big thing I encourage people to do is to think about what's truly fixed and what's truly variable. And so you kind of get people to say, well, what if? And there's a story in the book about how we convinced the FCC to think big about wiring broadband to schools. They were convinced that Senator Rockefeller didn't want the program E-Rate, which helped bring broadband to schools but hadn't kept up with the times. They were convinced that Rockefeller was not someone to be trifled with and he wouldn't allow an expansion of the program and adding a surcharge to wireline telephony. And sure enough, when we challenged that assumption and got them to think big, They went and did the checks. We went and did the checks, and we found out that it was possible to politically and technically to expand this program. That actually drove a presidential initiative and wired up tens of thousands of schools for broadband. So I encourage people to think big, and that's one simple way to get started. I guess the other one would be to actually think of that big ending at the beginning and write it down. And so, you know, whether that's a press release or a news article, but if you can envision that in the future, it helps you think about, well, what are the assumptions? Who do you have to go talk to? What has to happen? Right? It helps you kind of build a path from— where you are today to that big idea and what that would look like.

I'll stick with that for a sec because that was one of the tactics that stood out to us was the idea of envisioning and communicating what success looks like well before the project ever kicks off. And I think, like you said, I think the book mentioned a fake press release, a vision document. So what advice would you have for that state or local government CIO in terms of stealing this idea to ensure that their IT projects, you know, are a success before they even begin.

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a few tactics on this point. Think of the end at the beginning, which Nick just touched on, which is, can you write a press release? Can you write the news article that's envisioning what it's going to be at the end? Who are you impacting? What does it look like? Can you work backward from that to come up with a bunch of action steps? Absolutely. It can help frame who your detractors may be or who your supporters may be to kind of get ahead of those incentive and risk frameworks. And also, it can frankly just be motivating, right? Reading— if you're having a bad long day or you're feeling really stuck by the bureaucracy, it can be good to read that news article of the future. One of the very first things I did as a BA was put together a vision document. And a key here is really also the tactic of using the power of visual design. You can write a vision document in double-spaced Microsoft Word Times New Roman, like 12 font, but it's much better If you, if it's beautiful printed on like thick paper. And at the time I needed the help of my fellow Presidential Innovation Fellows to make a beautiful design document. But these days you can do it with Canva or there's so many tools out there. Our book proposal, we actually used this tactic as well, but we did it in Canva and without needing a professional designer. Not that professional designers are not totally worth it.

Right.

And so laying out what that vision may be. And in the case of my 21st Century BA document, which I think a lot of state and local government leaders might find relatable. I didn't have every last detail of what the future was going to look like. Every kind of goal or vision was maybe 3 sentences. What would it be like if we had a digital service team? Or I don't even think I had those words at the time. What would it look like if we had a team of modern technologists inside the VA working for veterans? What would it look like if we had a single, really excellent digital experience for veterans? What would it look like if we had self-service tools? Things like that. And it felt overwhelming and impossible when We wrote it in 2013, but when I left in 2017, we had completed 46 of the 48 things in that document. So it can also be a really kind of inspiring checklist as you go. And then the last point I'd say that, that is relatable on this is the concept of strangling the mainframe. So we all heard that the analogy of, you know, how do you eat an elephant? I think it's really important to have that long-term, big-picture goal of what are you trying to accomplish? What does it look like when it's really excellent, like the best possible? But then to get there, it's going to be a lot of steps and compromises and patience and wait times, et cetera. So if you have that vision really clearly articulated of where you're trying to go, but you can work backward from that into what you can do right now toward that goal, I think that's really the key to kind of making success over time in a bureaucracy.

Yeah, I love that.

So, you know, when you think about all the new technologies that are coming out and, you know, Nick, I know you're investing in a lot of these as well, is this going to automatically reform bureaucracies by improving constituent experience and making government more efficient, or is there more that agencies need to be thinking about? And, you know, is there a reality that maybe technology, when not properly applied, could make bureaucracy worse in certain circumstances?

Absolutely. Technology is just a tool, and it's all about, you know, how it's implemented and to what use, and do we have the skills and the processes and all of that the people around it. And so, you know, as an example, you know, we had really lousy pop-ups on websites that would ask you about your experience on the website before you even had a chance to go through the website. That was almost standard on a lot of federal websites, and now I'm dating myself back some time, but you're like, why would I want to take a survey about my experience? I'm actually just trying to find a piece of information or get something done. And yet there's probably some well-meaning person who said, well, you know, there's a requirement to ask constituents and customers their experiences in a digital format, and so we're going to put these surveys out there. And so you can have good intentions that get executed quite poorly, and I think that's why expertise in product and customer experience and design and engineering are so critical to pulling off good, not just customer experiences, but also employee experiences. I think those are also very important, and you want really to essentially iterate on these, so it's not a once-and-done. You're not doing a survey once a year, you know, you are constantly trying to improve the experiences. of users, and whether those users are customers or whether those are frontline employees, you want to understand through quantitative and qualitative means what's working, what's not, what's their frustration. And so sometimes that's surveying, but sometimes that's getting out of the office and spending real time with them. And that's another tactic we have in our book, which is, you know, essentially some elements of user-centered design where you observe the behavior, You ask open-ended questions and you really walk a mile in that user's shoes so you can see how they see the process rather than coming at it from the way the process was designed. The final thing I'll say on this is, you know, for paper, there was a certain process, right? But when we put things in a digital context, We may want to rethink that process. We may want to collapse it or change it, right? And so you can even think of providing defaults or populating forms because we already know information from other databases in government. And so with the right permissions and the right data sharing, you could say, well, I'm comfortable importing this and just tell me what the answer is rather than making me fill it out again. And so that's part of the opportunity. But we, to your point, we also have to have the right safeguards because technology can be not only poorly implemented, but it could also be misapplied or abused.

Yeah, if I could add to that, new technology is my favorite Trojan horse, and I think it can also be one of the biggest risks because if you just take your previous process and your previous technology and you put it in a newer programming language, you've accomplished nothing except spending a whole lot more money, right? And in many cases, it may work less well than it did before. But if you can say, hey, we're gonna get a new system. In the course of doing this, we're gonna relook at all of our processes, all of our policies, all of our forms, potentially even some of our laws so that this process works really well for that end user and that constituent. You can make huge changes. And because there's new technology and you're gonna have change and new training and things anyway, you can get way more change bundled in that than you could trickle out independently over a number of years.

Yeah, I love the concept of doing your homework like you both just outlined. A little light homework for our audience: where should they go to learn more about your book and to order it online?

You can check out our website at hackyourbureaucracy.com, and the book is available anywhere where books are sold, including audiobooks and Kindle, etc.

So, well, Nick and Marina, thanks so much for joining us this week on In Case You Missed It.

Thank you so much for having us. This is really fun. Good luck to everyone hacking your bureaucracies.

Everyone have a wonderful weekend.